Case Study

Organizational Strategy for Land Rights Advocacy

How can NGOs overcome government antagonism and affect change through advocacy?

In Indonesia, land is often taken away from local communities by natural resource companies, agribusinesses, and other powerful interests. Citizens forced from their ancestral property have little or no recourse; public and private corruption, as well as private security forces hired to control the land in dispute, lead to forced evictions and violence.

With the support of the Ford Foundation, Natural Capital Advisors engaged Reboot to support several Indonesian NGOs in their work to address land rights abuse. We quickly found that legislative reform was necessary to prevent further land exploitation. While the NGOs had plenty of evidence to share with policymakers, they had little experience with successful political advocacy. There was a need for communications strategies and capacity building to increase their ability to effect change.

Working closely with the NGOs, we developed an advocacy framework focused on media and citizen engagement as a route to access policymakers, signposting a collaborative path for advocacy campaigns. It has since been adopted by select NGOs in their work to increase media coverage and public dialogue.

Project Dates

January to May 2013

Services Provided

Capacity Development, Strategic Advisory

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Topics

There are nearly 600 laws and regulations relating to land use in Indonesia. Complex and contradictory, the policies nearly always protect powerful interests at the expense of local communities. Natural resource companies are able to evict citizens from their ancestral lands—a violation of human rights—with the impunity afforded by state concessions (as well as by privately-hired security firms). In 2011, the National Commission on Human Rights received 4,502 complaints of land rights abuse in Indonesia. With limited resolution mechanisms and rampant public and private sector corruption, citizens have little recourse; disputes can escalate into violent conflict with fatal consequences.

A number of Indonesian NGOs are working to defend communities’ interests and mediate disputes. Natural Capital Advisors, with the support of the Ford Foundation, engaged Reboot to work with the NGOs to increase their effectiveness. We quickly found that legislative reform was needed to protect at-risk communities and to prevent future land expropriation, but advocacy was an area in which the NGOs had little experience or precedent. Successful advocacy requires compelling evidence, public dialogue, and multi-stakeholder collaboration processes. While the NGOs had evidence in droves, they struggled to understand what information to share with policymakers and how. Further, they had traditionally employed hostile rhetoric in attempts to incite state action, alienating those they sought to influence.

With a history of antagonistic relations between government and civil society around land governance, we had little access to state actors. Working around this challenge, we set out to help develop the NGOs’ understanding of their target audiences and the best paths to reach them.

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We led a deeply collaborative design process to help the NGOs craft advocacy strategies and activities that leveraged their expertise and resources. We also developed their design research skills through workshops and trainings, enhancing our colleagues’ understanding of their target audiences, and connected these skills to specific areas where the NGOs needed greater capacity to develop and deploy messages and materials that would resonate.

Select services for this project included:

Program Advisory

Due to the historic antagonism between NGOs and government officials, we explored opportunities to work through the media. Journalists offered a key opportunity for meeting in the middle, as they were both accessible to the NGOs and influential amongst policymakers. We researched the Indonesian media’s processes and operations, and we then developed strategies for framing and packaging land rights information in ways tailored specifically for media actors and in ways that would resonate with policymakers when reported.

Technical Capacity Development

Our design research also focused on how the NGOs operate in order to make sure our suggestions did not strain their already-limited resources. We delivered workshops with groups of NGOs and led targeted training and consultation sessions with select organizations and activists. These session focused on both design process as well as specific technical issues, such as data analysis and data security.

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Working closely with the NGOs, we designed an advocacy framework for influencing land governance policy in Indonesia. The framework offers resources and tools for NGOs to carry out advocacy campaigns in collaboration with each other, with a focus on media and citizen engagement as a route to access policymakers. Using the framework, the NGOs present journalists with information that is timely, compelling, conveniently packaged, and that will resonate with both them and their audiences.

The framework has since been adopted by select NGOs to increase media coverage and public dialogue on issues related to land rights and land conflict. Several NGOs have also integrated design thinking approaches into their operating processes and have noted increased effectiveness in their ability to understand and therefore collaborate with the diverse stakeholders involved in land governance in Indonesia.